Elections

His continued grip on the party shows, once again, that the former president can outlast almost any outrage cycle, no matter how intensely it burns.​​One year ago, on the very same day when fevered supporters of Donald J. Trump breached the United States Capitol in a violent riot that defiled a symbol of American democracy, the leadership of the Republican National Committee happened to gather, almost 700 miles away at a Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla.In Washington, Mr. Trump’s political future had never appeared darker — and was dimming fast. He was an electoral loser. Top staff were resigning in protest. Prominent allies were repudiating him. Social media giants would soon banish him.But the seeds of a political revival, at least within his own party, were there from the start.With broken glass and debris still scattered across the Capitol complex, well over half of House Republicans voted against certifying the election, echoing Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud. Even as the national committee drafted a statement condemning the violence — it did not mention Mr. Trump by name — some committee members pressed to add an expression of sympathy for the views of the crowd that had mobbed the Capitol. They had to be overruled.The next morning, Mr. Trump called into the committee’s meeting via speakerphone. “We love you!” some of the attendees shouted.“Many of us from the Northeast states just rolled our eyes,” said Bill Palatucci, a Republican national committeeman from New Jersey and a prominent Trump critic inside the party. But more common was the view of members like Corey Steinmetz, of Wyoming, who said in an interview that blaming Mr. Trump for the events of Jan. 6 was “nothing more than a sham from the get-go.”Today, the Republican Party is very much still Mr. Trump’s, transforming his lies about a stolen 2020 election into an article of faith, and even a litmus test that he is seeking to impose on the 2022 primaries with the candidates he backs. He is the party’s most coveted endorser, its top fund-raiser and the polling front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination.Mr. Trump is also deeply divisive, unpopular among the broader electorate and under investigation for his business practices and his interference with election officials in Fulton County, Ga. He remains the same politician whose White House oversaw four years of devastating Republican losses, including of the House and Senate. And while a scattered few Republicans publicly warn about yoking the party to him, more fret in private about the consequences.Yet his unrivaled power inside the G.O.P., one year after inciting the sacking of the Capitol to forcibly forestall the certification of the election, is a testament to his unrelenting hold on the loyalty of the party base.His rehabilitation — to the extent one was even needed among Republicans — is the latest example of an enduring lesson of his tumultuous time in politics: that Mr. Trump can outlast almost any outrage cycle, no matter how intensely it burns.The spotlight shifts. The furor fades. Then, he rewrites history.For Jan. 6, the warped narrative that Mr. Trump has spun is that “the real insurrection happened on Nov. 3rd” — the date he lost a free and fair election.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?There was a fleeting moment, in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, when Republican leaders in the House and Senate had an opportunity to break cleanly with Mr. Trump, as Democrats moved swiftly to impeach him.“Count me out,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a staunch Trump ally, had said that night on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.”But if some Republican lawmakers who had narrowly escaped the violence that day were at a breaking point, Republican voters were less moved. Within a month, in early February 2021, an AP-NORC Poll found that only 11 percent of Republicans said Mr. Trump bore a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for the breach of the Capitol; that figure is at 22 percent today.Republican politicians quickly realigned themselves to comport with public opinion. In less than a week, Mr. Graham was back at Mr. Trump’s side, riding Air Force One, and he repeatedly visited Mr. Trump’s golf courses for face time with the former president in the last year.Perhaps the first most consequential pivot back to Mr. Trump came from Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, who had said on Jan. 13 that Mr. Trump “bears responsibility” for the riot. By the end of the month, he was on a plane to Mar-a-Lago to try to keep the peace.An article was published about the closely-guarded meeting ahead of time. “Did you leak it?” Mr. Trump said to Mr. McCarthy twice, according to two people briefed on the discussion. Mr. McCarthy said he did not.Mr. Trump smiled slightly and shrugged his shoulders, seeming to acknowledge that Mr. McCarthy hadn’t been the leaker. “But it’s good for both of us, Kevin,” Mr. Trump said. A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy declined to comment, while a spokesman for Mr. Trump denied the exchange took place.Afterward, Mr. Trump’s PAC released a photo of the two men side by side.In the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, had been more forceful in denouncing Mr. Trump. “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr. McConnell declared in a floor speech, adding, “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”But Mr. McConnell ultimately voted to acquit Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial on a charge of inciting the insurrection.Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell are not on speaking terms now, though Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chair of the Senate Republican campaign arm, has been solicitous of Mr. Trump, even giving him a new “Champion for Freedom” award on a trip to Mar-a-Lago in April.That same weekend, at a Republican National Committee fund-raiser, Mr. Trump ripped Mr. McConnell while speaking to donors, uttering a crude insult to his intelligence.On his way out of office, Mr. Trump had fumed about starting a third party of his own, though he closed the door on that idea in his first post-presidential speech in late February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference of pro-Trump activists.Instead, he said, he planned to take back command of the G.O.P. and cleanse it of his critics.“Get rid of them all,” he said.Mr. Trump has already endorsed candidates in nearly 100 races in the midterms, setting up the 2022 primary season as something of a vengeance tour against those Republicans who dared to cross him. Some advisers worry his expansive set of endorsements will expose him to stinging potential losses that could signal a weakening of his sway over the Republican electorate.Still, Mr. Trump has recruited challengers to his loudest G.O.P. critics, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was purged from House leadership for refusing, in her words, to “spread his destructive lies” about 2020.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

Merrick Garland vows to pursue all those responsible for 6 January attackAttorney general says justice department has ‘no higher priority’ and promises further actions over ‘assault on our democracy’ The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, on Wednesday vowed that the justice department would hold accountable all those responsible for the deadly 6 January attack, whether they were physically present at the Capitol or not.Garland’s remarks come as he faces growing calls from lawmakers, legal experts and former elected officials to intensify the department’s investigation into the events of Capitol assault, and in particular to prosecute those who helped orchestrate the failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, including Donald Trump and his associates.More than 1,000 US public figures aided Trump’s effort to overturn electionRead moreIn a solemn speech on the eve of the first anniversary of the assault on the seat of government, Garland said it did not matter whether the perpetrators had been present at the Capitol riot or committed other crimes that wrought chaos on that day.“The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” Garland said in his address, delivered from the justice department’s Great Hall in Washington. “We will follow the facts wherever they lead.”Garland recounted in detail the brutality of the day, contesting a rightwing revisionist narrative that the attack was not violent. Officers had been assaulted with pipes and poles, beaten and shocked with stun guns, he said. One officer had been dragged down the stairs by rioters, while lawmakers and the vice-president fled for their lives.“As a consequence, proceedings in both chambers were disrupted for hours – interfering with a fundamental element of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next,” he said. “Those involved must be held accountable, and there is no higher priority for us at the Department of Justice.”Garland did not mention Trump by name, and in keeping with the justice department’s longstanding rule not to comment on ongoing investigations, he did not detail any possible leads the department was pursuing related to the former US president, his family or his allies.But the carefully crafted speech seemed designed to address concerns about the focus of the investigation. Garland said he understood the intense public interest in the case and promised that the actions taken by the department so far “will not be our last”.The department’s work so far, he explained, was laying the foundation for more serious and complicated cases. “In complex cases, initial charges are often less severe than later charged offenses,” he said. “This is purposeful as investigators methodically collect and sift through more evidence.“There cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless,” he added.The investigation into the events of 6 January was one of the “largest, most complex and most resource-intensive investigations” in the nation’s history, Garland said.To date, he said, investigators had issued 5,000 subpoenas and search warrants, seized 2,000 devices, viewed 20,000 hours of video footage, searched 15 terabytes of data and received 300,000 tips from the public. More than 700 people in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia have been charged for their roles in the insurrection, which left 140 law enforcement officers injured. Five officers who defended the Capitol that day have since died.Reading their names aloud, Garland asked for a moment of silence to remember the fallen officers.On Thursday, Democratic leaders in Congress will host a day of remembrance events, beginning with speeches from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the US Capitol.Previewing his speech, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Biden would acknowledge “the singular responsibility President Trump has for the chaos and carnage” of 6 January.“The president is going to speak to the truth of what happened, not the lies that some have spread since, and the peril it posed to the rule of law and our system of democratic governance,” Psaki said, adding that Biden was “clear-eyed about the threat the former president represents to our democracy and how the former president constantly works to undermine basic American values and rule of law”.Garland’s remarks extended beyond the events of 6 January. He lamented a rise in violence that has touched nearly every aspect of American life. He pointed to attacks on elections officials, airline crews, teachers, journalists, police officers, judges and members of Congress.“These acts and threats of violence are not associated with any one set of partisan or ideological views,” he warned. “But they are permeating so many parts of our national life that they risk becoming normalized and routine if we do not stop them.”The justice department, he promised, would work within the bounds of the first amendment to prosecute all those who made unlawful threats. He also committed the department to using “the enforcement powers we have” to protect voting rights, warning of efforts in some states to audit election results, drive out election officials or allow state lawmakers to overturn the will of voters.“As with violence and threats of violence, the justice department – even the Congress – cannot alone defend the right to vote,” he said. “The responsibility to preserve democracy – and to maintain faith in the legitimacy of its essential processes – lies with every elected official and every American.”TopicsMerrick GarlandUS Capitol attackUS politicsBiden administrationJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

Ms. Adams, who became speaker on Wednesday, will lead the most diverse City Council ever as New York tries to recover from the pandemic. She already faces battles with the mayor.Adrienne Adams had to overcome several obstacles on her way to being voted in on Wednesday as the first Black woman to serve as speaker of the New York City Council, the second-most-powerful position in city government.She had a competitive race to retain her City Council seat representing southeast Queens, including a primary challenge from her predecessor, and entered the contest for speaker relatively late. Mayor Eric Adams did what he had said he would not do and tried, unsuccessfully, to tip the scales in favor of one of Ms. Adams’s rivals.Ms. Adams, 61, a moderate Democrat, prevailed and will now lead the City Council, as New York grapples once again with being a center of the coronavirus pandemic while facing a difficult financial future.The new City Council, which is more diverse than ever and has its first-ever female majority, also looks to be more ideologically divided than in recent memory. And in spite of public efforts to show they are on the same page, Ms. Adams already faces potential battles with the mayor on everything from the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails to new legislation that would grant more than 800,000 legal residents who are not citizens the right to vote in municipal elections.Ms. Adams, who lost her father to Covid, said her priority would be seeing the city through the pandemic and working to strengthen families that have been damaged in its wake.“We meet here today as the most diverse Council in history, led by the first African-American speaker,” Ms. Adams said in a speech Wednesday after her colleagues voted nearly unanimously to make her speaker. “While this is a moment to celebrate this milestone, we must realize that we are here because New York is at the crossroads of multiple crises — each one competing for our full attention.”Ms. Adams, the first Black person to serve as speaker, will lead a historically diverse City Council.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesIn an interview, Ms. Adams noted that the pandemic had further exposed existing inequalities on issues ranging from medical care to child care, housing and access to high speed internet. “All roads lead through this pandemic,” she said. “When I think of my priorities, I think of rebuilding a city.”Ms. Adams’s predecessor as speaker, Corey Johnson, said it would not be easy.“We’re in this painful and uncertain time with Omicron and not knowing what this will do to our economy,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “This new Council has more members who are very far left and more who are far right. To get things done will be a challenge.”He added: “But it’s not an impossible challenge because Adrienne has the skill set, track record and temperament.”Yvette Buckner, a political strategist who is vice chair of 21 in ’21, a group that helped elect a record number of women to the City Council, said Ms. Adams would “be able to understand the needs of the city from a different lens,” partly because of her experience as a mother of four and a grandmother of 10.Even as the country goes through “a long overdue reckoning of racial justice,” New Yorkers need to feel safe from discriminatory policing, “safe from the virus and safe from violence,” Ms. Adams said in her speech.Mr. Adams will be her counterpart in that effort. Though he suffered a significant political loss when Ms. Adams amassed enough support to become speaker, they both say they have a good relationship.Ms. Adams and Mr. Adams were classmates at Bayside High School in Queens in the late 1970s. Mr. Adams, discouraged by an undetected learning disability, has spoken often about not being a model student. Ms. Adams, on the other hand, was a cheerleader who founded a gospel chorus at the high school, which was mostly white at the time.“I actually went to class. We knew of each other but we did not hang out in the same crowd,” Ms. Adams said of her time at high school with the mayor. “But we are so proud of each other.”After graduating from Spelman College, Ms. Adams worked as a corporate trainer for communications companies. She served as chairwoman of Community Board 12 in Queens before running for office in 2017 after her predecessor was convicted of fraud and removed from office. (His conviction was later reversed.)As a councilwoman, she passed legislation to limit the sale of tax liens and established a task force to make sure the liens were implemented fairly, and she helped allocate $10 million in the budget to create a Black studies curriculum for public schools.Many in the city’s political class were surprised when Mr. Adams and his team tried to install Francisco Moya, a councilman from Queens, as speaker, particularly because Mr. Adams and Ms. Adams were largely seen as being politically in sync.Ms. Adams faces potential battles with Mayor Eric Adams on the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails and legislation that would grant noncitizen legal residents the right to vote in municipal elections. Anna Watts for The New York TimesMs. Adams, who was a co-chair of the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, opposed deeply cutting the Police Department budget as part of the defund the police movement. Mr. Adams is a former police captain who has criticized efforts to cut the police budget and who won the Democratic primary on a message of improving public safety.“How am I going to dislike someone that shares my same last name?” Mr. Adams said at a news conference on Tuesday. “I love Adrienne.”The mayor credited Ms. Adams, who endorsed him in the Democratic primary, with playing a “pivotal role” in helping him win.Ms. Adams also strongly agrees with Mr. Adams that the city, and its schools, should not shut down because of the highly contagious Omicron variant.But there are already two potential points of conflict. Mr. Adams has raised concerns about a bill passed during the previous City Council session that would give legal residents the right to vote in municipal elections, saying he believes that the 30-day residency requirement is too short. He has not ruled out vetoing the legislation.Incoming N.Y.C. Mayor Eric Adams’s New AdministrationCard 1 of 7Schools Chancellor: David Banks. More

One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified.Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home. More

A wave of misleading revisionism has become epidemic in both autocracies and democracies. It has been notably effective — and contagious.In Russia, an organization dedicated to remembering Soviet-era abuses faces state-ordered liquidation as the Kremlin imposes a sanitized national history in its place.In Hungary, the government has ejected or assumed control of educational and cultural institutions, using them to manufacture a xenophobic national heritage aligned with its ethnonationalist politics.In China, the ruling Communist Party is openly wielding schoolbooks, films, television shows and social media to write a new version of Chinese history better suited to the party’s needs.And in the United States, Donald J. Trump and his allies continue to push a false retelling of the 2020 election, in which Democrats stole the vote and the Jan. 6 riot to disrupt President Biden’s certification was largely peaceful or staged by Mr. Trump’s opponents.Rioters confronting law enforcement inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesHistory is continuously rewritten, whether by scholars updating their assumptions, activists reframing the record, or politicians massaging collective memory for their own ends.But a wave of brazenly false or misleading historical revision, from democratic and authoritarian governments alike, may be threatening an already-weakened sense of a shared, accepted narrative about the world.The trend, scholars believe, reflects some of the century’s defining forces. Polarized societies receptive to identity-affirming falsehoods. Collapsing faith in central institutions or arbiters of truth. Rising nationalism. Despots growing savvier. Elected leaders turning increasingly toward illiberalism.As a result, “we should be more likely to see the sort of historical revisionism” pushed by these leaders, said Erica Frantz, a Michigan State University political scientist.In some places, the goals are sweeping: to re-engineer a society, starting at its most basic understanding of its collective heritage. Emphasizing the importance of that process, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has repeated a 19th century Confucian scholar’s saying: “To destroy a country, you must first eradicate its history.”Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2020.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesOn June 4, 2021, it was empty.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesBut often, the goal is seemingly more short-term: to provoke rage or pride in ways that will rally citizens behind the leader’s agenda.Mr. Trump’s election lies appear to be a successful example. They have splintered Americans’ shared sense of reality in ways that could strengthen Mr. Trump’s allies, justifying efforts to control the machinery of future elections. If global trends that enable such tactics continue, there may be more like this to come.Members of  Russia’s Youth Army  practiced assembling rifles, first aid skills and martial arts last month in Noginsk, near Moscow.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesA Changing WorldOne set of changes may be particularly important in driving this trend: how governments tend to govern.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Authoritarianism “is undergoing a transformation,” one recent academic paper said, summarizing the growing view among scholars.Since the Arab Spring and “color revolution” uprisings of a decade ago, dictators have shifted emphasis from blunt-force repression (although this still happens, too) to subtler methods like manipulating information or sowing division, aimed at preventing dissent over suppressing it.Among other changes, the blaring state newspaper has been replaced with arrays of flashy, state-aligned outlets and social media bots, creating a false sense that the official narrative is not imposed from on high but emerging organically.More sophisticated propaganda, aimed at persuasion over coercion, often manifests as a particular sort of historical rewriting. Rather than simply excising disfavored officials or government blunders, it cultivates national pride and collective grievance meant to rally citizens.The Kremlin, for instance, has massaged memories of the Soviet Union and its fall into a heritage of Russian greatness and besiegement, justifying the need for a strong leader like Vladimir V. Putin and encouraging Russians to gratefully embrace him.This manifests in smaller ways, too. Mr. Putin has falsely insisted that NATO pledged never to extend east of Germany, justifying his recent aggression toward Ukraine as defensive and necessary.Democracies are changing just as dramatically, with leaders growing more illiberal and strong-fisted.The widening social divides, along with the growing popular distrust of experts and institutions, often help elevate those leaders in the first place.This can be a source of support for a leader willing to throw out the official history and replace it with something closer to what his or her supporters want to hear. And it gives such leaders another incentive: to justify power grabs as essential to defeating enemies abroad or within.Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, for instance, has revised Hungary’s history to that of an innocent victim of Nazis and Communists that was finally made safe by his patriotic guidance. In this way, he champions skepticism toward immigration as a continuation of a great national battle — one that also requires him to suppress rivals, critics and independent institutions.President Donald J. Trump said in 2020 that he would promote a new “pro-American” school curriculum.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesWhy Revision WorksThe most effective propaganda of any sort, research finds, often focuses on an appeal to some group identity like race or religion.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

Just months after Delta fueled hospital failures and funeral pyres, India’s leaders again offer a mixed message: Their political rallies are packed even as they order curfews and work closures.NEW DELHI — When the Omicron coronavirus variant spread through India late in December, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the nation to be vigilant and follow medical guidelines. Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of the capital region of Delhi, swiftly introduced night curfews, shut down movie theaters, and slashed restaurants and public transport to half capacity.Then, both men hit the campaign trail, often appearing without masks in packed rallies of thousands.“When it is our bread and butter at stake, they force restrictions and lockdowns,” said Ajay Tiwari, a 41-year-old taxi driver in New Delhi. “There are much bigger crowds at political rallies, but they don’t impose any lockdown in those areas. It really pains us deep in the heart.”As Omicron fuels a rapid spread of new infections through India’s major urban hubs, the country’s pandemic fatigue has been intensified by a sense of déjà vu and the frustration of mixed signals.A temporary coronavirus care center in New Delhi on Wednesday. Money Sharma/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt has been just a few months since the deadly Delta variant ravaged the country, when government leaders vastly underestimated its threat and publicly flouted their own advice. The memories of overwhelmed hospitals and funeral pyres working around the clock are still all too fresh here.The metropolis of Mumbai on Wednesday reported more than 15,000 new infections in 24 hours — the highest daily caseload since the pandemic began, beating the city’s previous record of about 11,000 cases during the second wave in the spring. In New Delhi, the number of daily infections increased by nearly 100 percent overnight.The sheer size of India’s population, at 1.4 billion, has always kept experts wary about the prospects of a new coronavirus variant. In few places around world was the toll of Delta as stark as in India. The country’s official figures show about half a million pandemic deaths — a number that experts say vastly undercounts the real toll.A temporary coronavirus care facility was set up at the Chennai Trade Center in Chennai. Scientists say any optimism about Omicron is premature simply because of how many people the variant could infect.Idrees Mohammed/EPA, via ShutterstockOmicron’s high transmissibility is such that cases are multiplying at a dangerously rapid pace, and it appears to be ignoring India’s main line of defense: a vaccination drive that has covered about half of the population. Initial studies show that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, a locally manufactured version of which has been used for about 90 percent of India’s vaccinations, does not protect against Omicron infections, though it appears to help reduce the severity of the illness.Sitabhra Sinha, a professor of physics and computational biology at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, said his research into the reproduction rate of the virus — an indicator of how fast it is spreading that is called the “R value” — in major cities like Delhi and Mumbai shows “insanely high” numbers for cities that had built decent immunity. Both had a large number of infections in the spring, and a majority of their adult populations have been vaccinated.“Given this high R value, one is looking at incredibly large numbers unless something is done to stop the spread,” he said.A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rally in Ferozepur on Wednesday. Omicron is spreading in India at a time of high public activity — busy holiday travel, and large election rallies across several states that are going to the polls in the coming months.Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut officials appear to be latching onto the optimism of the early indications from places like South Africa, where a fast spread of the variant did not cause devastating damage, rather than drawing lessons from the botched response to the Delta wave in the spring that ravaged India.Dr. Anand Krishnan, a professor of epidemiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, said India’s messaging of the new variant as “a mild illness” has led to complacency.“The health system has stopped being complacent. But the population is complacent. People are not wearing masks or changing their behavior,” Dr. Krishnan said. “They think it is a mild illness, and whatever restrictions are being imposed are seen more as a nuisance than necessary.”Scientists say any optimism about Omicron is premature simply because of how many people the variant could infect.“Even if it is a microscopic percentage who require hospitalization,” Dr. Sinha said, “the fact is that the total population we’re talking about is huge.”A vaccination center in Bangalore. India’s vaccination drive has covered about half of the population.Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlthough the percentage of newly infected people turning to hospitals has been increasing in recent days, data from India’s worst-hit cities — Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata — showed that only a small number of Covid-designated beds were occupied so far. Data compiled by the Observer Research Foundation showed that about three percent of the known active cases in Delhi and about 12 percent in Mumbai have required hospitalization.Dr. J. A. Jayalal, until recently the president of The Indian Medical Association, said what worried him was not hospital beds or oxygen running out — capacity that Indian officials have been trying to expand after the deadly shortfalls during the Delta wave — but that the health system might face an acute shortfall of health workers.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 6The global surge. More

Ten House Republicans voted to charge President Donald J. Trump with inciting the Capitol attack. All of them are still struggling with the consequences.WASHINGTON — The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump did so with the same conviction — that a president of their party deserved to be charged with inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the same hope — that his role in doing so would finally persuade the G.O.P. to repudiate him.But in the year since the deadliest attack on the Capitol in centuries, none of the 10 lawmakers have been able to avoid the consequences of a fundamental miscalculation about the direction of their party. The former president is very much the leader of the Republicans, and it is those who stood against him whom the party has thrust into the role of pariah.Since they cast their impeachment votes on Jan. 13, Representatives Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois have announced their retirements amid death threats from voters and hostility from colleagues. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming has gone from a star in the House Republican leadership to an exiled party gadfly and truth teller.Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Peter Meijer of Michigan and Fred Upton of Michigan have Trump-endorsed primary challengers on their heels and uncertain political futures. Four others — John Katko of New York, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Tom Rice of South Carolina and David Valadao of California — have gone to ground, silent if not silenced, in the apparent hope that the entire episode will be forgotten.The fate of the 10 over the past year has offered a bracing reality check about the nature of today’s Republican Party, one that has fully embraced the lie of a stolen election and its main purveyor, and sidelined the few remaining members who have dared to publicly question Mr. Trump or his actions.“There’s been this waiting game and an arbitrage between an individual’s political future and the trajectory of that guy, assuming the apex has passed,” Mr. Meijer said in a lengthy interview, referring to Mr. Trump. “The view among some was that this would be essentially a self-correcting issue,” and that Mr. Trump’s power would fade.“I think that’s proven overly optimistic,” Mr. Meijer added.The 10 could be forgiven for believing that their votes last January would not leave them so exposed. In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, some of Mr. Trump’s most stalwart allies quit the government in disgust. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, voted against impeachment but declared, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, orchestrated Mr. Trump’s acquittal after a hasty Senate impeachment trial. But he had let it be known that he considered the president culpable, and said as much in a scathing speech afterward: “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”But the rhetorical cover fire proved as ephemeral as it was useless. Mr. Gonzalez, deluged with threats and fearing for the safety of his wife and children, announced in September that he would not seek re-election — and called Mr. Trump “a cancer for the country.”After receiving threats, Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio announced in September that he would not seek re-election.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesA Cuban American who starred as a wide receiver at Ohio State, Mr. Gonzalez had been considered the kind of politician who would ensure the Republican Party’s future in a multiethnic, multiracial country after his election in 2018. But he found little support from the party that recruited him into politics once Mr. Trump endorsed a primary challenger and the threats began.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Mr. Kinzinger, who announced his retirement in October, has faced similar threats. But he has turned his opposition to Mr. Trump into a capstone of his career, defying Republican leaders to join the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, laying into Mr. Trump and his defenders at every opportunity, and promising not to leave the political stage once his House career ends this year.“The 2020 election was not stolen,” Mr. Kinzinger said in a lengthy video message on Wednesday for the anniversary of Jan. 6. “Joe Biden won, and Donald Trump lost. We have to admit it. But the leadership of the Republican Party won’t. They lied to the American people and continue to push the big lie and echo the conspiracy theories that line their pockets, keeping them in power.”Mr. Upton has never been one for flash, yet his future is no more secure, despite 35 years in the House. He could face Steve Carra, a state representative endorsed by Mr. Trump, who would have to move homes to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Upton because of new congressional maps drafted by a bipartisan commission.“I’m 100 percent running for Congress, it’s an honor to have President Trump’s endorsement, and Fred Upton will not be a congressman in 2023,” Mr. Carra said in a text message.Even if Mr. Upton does not have to face Mr. Carra, his impeachment vote has placed him at risk. The new map pushed Mr. Upton into the same district as Bill Huizenga, a more conservative congressman who voted against impeachment.Under the circumstances, Mr. Upton is showing clear signs of fatigue.“You’ve got metal detectors now going on the House floor. We get really nasty threats at home. The tone gets, you know, tougher and tougher, and it’s a pretty toxic place,” he said last month on CNN. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”None of the 10 have fallen so far in the Republican firmament as Ms. Cheney, nor risen so high in the esteem of many in both parties who fear and loathe Mr. Trump. The daughter of a former vice president who was once the embodiment of confrontational conservatism, for better or worse, Ms. Cheney started 2021 as the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, a political knife fighter believed by many to be destined for the speakership.Her vote to impeach, and her outspoken denunciations of the lie — pushed by Mr. Trump and embraced by many of her colleagues — that the 2020 election was “stolen,” cost her dearly. She was ousted from her leadership post, ejected from the Wyoming Republican Party and targeted repeatedly by the former president, who has tried to unite Wyoming voters around the primary opponent he has endorsed, Harriet Hageman.Ms. Cheney has soldiered on, becoming the vice chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the riot, the face of Republican resistance to Trumpism and a one-woman wrecking crew for Mr. McCarthy’s ambitions to become speaker next year if the party retakes control of the House.Looking back, Ms. Cheney said in an interview that her fall from Republican leadership was inevitable as long as she had to share the stage with Mr. McCarthy, whose brief denunciation of Mr. Trump after Jan. 6 quickly gave way to a resumption of fealty.“It was increasingly clear that staying as conference chair was going to require me to perpetuate the lie about the election,” Ms. Cheney said. “I was simply not willing to look the other way and accept what he did.”Mr. McCarthy, by contrast, visited Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla, near the end of January, making it “pretty clear the path that he had chosen,” Ms. Cheney added. “It was one that was not faithful to the Constitution.”Never one to let bygones be bygones, Mr. Trump has relentlessly pursued retribution against those who voted to impeach him.In September, he endorsed a square-jawed, Army Special Forces veteran, Joe Kent, to challenge Ms. Herrera Beutler, who before her vote had revealed one of the most damning vignettes of Jan. 6 for Mr. Trump. She recounted a phone call in which Mr. McCarthy had personally pleaded with the president to call off the rioters during the assault. Mr. Trump had responded, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

The killing of George Floyd and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed drove an exceptionally large increase in foundation grants and pledges to criminal and racial justice reform groups and other causes, ranging from the United Negro College Fund to the Center for Antiracist Research and from the National Museum of African American History to the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.Candid — a website that connects “people who want to change the world with the resources they need to do it” — published “What does Candid’s grants data say about funding for racial equity in the United States?” by Anna Koob on July 24, 2020.Koob wrote:In the months since George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, we witnessed a surge in attention to longstanding anti-Black racism in the United States. Although racial inequality is hardly a new phenomenon, the public reaction to these events does feel bigger and more broad based, a trend that’s reflected in the well-documented rapid increase in related philanthropic giving to racial equity in a matter of weeks.Before Floyd’s death, Candid found that philanthropies provided “$3.3 billion in racial equity funding” for the nine years from 2011 to 2019. Since then, Candid calculations revealed much higher totals for both 2020 and 2021: “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”Among the top funders, according to Candid’s calculations, are the Ford Foundation, at $3 billion; Mackenzie Scott, at $2.9 billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contributions Program, at $2.1 billion; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, $1.2 billion; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $1.1 billion; Silicon Valley Community Foundation, $1 billion; Walton Family Foundation, $689 million; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, $438 million; and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, $350.5 million.There are Democratic strategists who worry about unintended political consequences that could flow from this surge in philanthropic giving. Rob Stein, one of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, an organization of major donors on the left, argued in a phone interview that while most foundation spending is on programs that have widespread support, “when progressive philanthropists fund groups that promote extreme views like ‘defunding the police’ or that sanction ‘cancel culture,’ they are exacerbating intraparty conflict and stoking interparty backlash.” The danger, according to Stein, is that “some progressive politicians and funders are contributing to divisiveness within their ranks and giving fodder to the right.”Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, argued in an email:Whether inadvertent or not, some progressive foundations are funding work that is shortsighted and harmful to the long-term progress they hope to achieve. We recognize that every successful movement has people and institutions playing a variety of roles. There are folks whose job it is to push the envelope and others whose job it is to work within the system to make change. Some need to push the envelope and some need to assemble the compromise that can pass. That’s all part of the process.However, Bennett continued, “It’s crystal clear that some ideas being pushed by activists and funded by lefty foundations go beyond that paradigm, treading into territory that is flat-out politically toxic and that undermine our collective goals.”Bennett cited a post-2020 election study commissioned by Third Way and other groups that “found that Republicans used ‘Defund the Police’ as a cudgel against moderate Democrats, and it played a major role in the loss of more than a dozen House seats. These losses brought us to the brink of handing an insurrectionist the Speaker’s gavel.”“It’s also clear,” in Bennett’s view,that this work has led to a backlash, and it’s not confined to white voters. In Minneapolis, where a Defund the Police ballot initiative failed by a wide margin in November, it performed worst in the two districts with the heaviest Black populations. You have probably seen the Pew Research from October that showed declining support across the board for less funding for police. What’s even more striking is that on the question of whether police budgets should grow or shrink, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more in favor of higher police budgets than white Democrats. None of that is the fault of the foundations, but it is vital for them to fully appreciate the political context for their funding.Any foundation, Bennett declared,that completely ignores the political impact of their advocacy is violating the Hippocratic oath. They can and must keep their eye on the politics of the movements they advance. And they must balance shifting the long-term narrative of causes they support with the near-term political consequences of their actions. If they don’t, they may inadvertently provide potent political fodder to the illiberal, antidemocratic Trumpian G.O.P., and thereby endanger our republic.Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, wrote at the end of November, “It’s an undeniable fact that Democratic Party elites, progressive activists, foundation and think-tank officials, and most opinion journalists are well to the left of the party’s rank and file.”It’s possible, Tomasky continued, “that certain issues, or ways of talking about certain issues, will be established as litmus tests within the party that could be quite problematic for Democrats trying to run in purple districts.”Tom Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia who is now executive director of George Soros’s Open Society-U.S., strongly defends the role of foundations. Leading up to the 2020 election, foundations invested “$700 million in voter protection that probably held democracy together,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “Philanthropy saved the day.”Critics who focus on the small set of controversial foundation programs that may be used by Republicans against Democrats, Perriello said, fail to recognize that “what is hurting Democrats is that there is not a core economic message and that allows Republicans to set these (cultural and racial) issues as a priority.”Perriello cited same-sex marriage as an example of philanthropy initially “pushing the Overton window” farther than the electorate was willing to go, but, over time, “now it’s a winning issue.”Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, argued in a phone interview that no consideration is — or can be — given to partisan political consequences:We make no calculations about how our grantees give credibility or not to the Democratic Party. That is of no concern to the Ford Foundation, or to me personally.Walker continued: “We support organizations that are working toward more justice and more inclusion in America, but we have no interest in the Democratic Party’s strengths or weaknesses.”I asked Walker about the concerns raised by Stein and Bennett. “We support issues that are about progress and inclusion and justice, but the chips fall where they fall,” Walker said.I also asked Walker about a subject that became a central issue in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race: “critical race theory.” Walker said that the foundation supports proponents of the theory “because we believe there is value in understanding how race is a factor in our legal system,” adding that the foundation does not support the views of its grantees “100 percent of the time, but at the end of the day we believe in certain ideas of justice and fairness in our society.”Kristen Mack, a managing director at the MacArthur Foundation, replied by email to my inquiry about foundation spending:Our grantmaking is intended to further our programmatic strategies, each of which is based on a theory of change and clear set of goals. We are aware of the larger context in the fields in which we work and recognize that our goals may be perceived by some as leaning toward a political point of view or party. Our overarching mission, however, is to create a more just, verdant and peaceful world, which is in our view a result that would be welcomed by people across the political spectrum. We are careful not to involve ourselves in, or to make decisions based on, strengthening or opposing any political party.The Nov. 2 Minneapolis election provided a case study of the complex politics of the defund-the-police movement. Voters in Minneapolis rejected — by 56 percent to 44 percent — an amendment to the city charter that would have dismantled the police department and replaced it with a department of public safety.All three wards with majorities or pluralities of Black voters — wards 4, 5 and 6 — voted against the amendment by margins larger than the citywide average, at 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent. Voters in three other of the city’s 13 wards — 8, 9 and 10 — strongly supported the amendment to disband the police department, 57 percent to 43 percent. Voters in wards 8, 9 and 10 are majority or plurality white, with whites making up 54.1 percent of the population of the three wards taken together, according to data provided to The Times by Jeff Matson of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota.The battle over the amendment reverberated into the races for City Council, resulting in the defeat of some incumbents who supported dismantling the police department.Esme Murphy of Minneapolis television station WCCO interviewed several of the victors:“Emily Koski, a mother of two in south Minneapolis, defeated Ward 11 incumbent Jeremy Schroeder, one of the strongest voices who in June of 2020 called for defunding the Minneapolis police.”Koski told Murphy, “I felt this was the time to step up and make sure that we are actually listening to all of our community members and I feel like they felt they had been shut out.”Similarly, in northern Minneapolis, Murphy reported: “LaTrisha Vetaw beat incumbent Phillipe Cunningham. He too was a strong supporter of replacing the police. ‘I ran because I love this community and we deserve so much better in this community than what we were getting.’”The single largest contribution, $650,000, to the Yes 4 Minneapolis PAC, the leading group seeking approval of the charter amendment to dismantle the police department, was from Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.Some philanthropies, in the view of Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, have inadvertently become trapped in the politics of polarization. In a phone interview, Kramer contended:Too many — on both left and right — believe they are just one punch away from knocking the other side out. The problem, they say, is that we haven’t gone far enough, the reason we haven’t crushed the other side is because we are trimming our sails. I don’t think they see how they are widening the divide and making the fundamental problem worse.This set of beliefs in particularly problematic at this juncture, Kramer continued, because “the public has lost faith in all our institutions. Neoliberalism is dead, but in the absence of something better, people are drifting toward ethnonationalism as a way to explain what seems wrong about the world to them.”Instead of looking for a knockout punch, Kramer argued, “with neoliberalism dead, something will replace it. The challenge is to find something better than ethnonationalism — a way to think about the relationship of government and markets to people that is better suited to a 21st-century economy and society.”Jonathan Chait, a columnist for New York magazine, wrote an essay in late November on the dilemmas of the Biden presidency, “Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze,” in which he argued that progressive foundationshave churned out studies and deployed activists to bring left-wing ideas into the political debate. At this they have enjoyed overwhelming success. In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans — the Green New Deal, “Defund the police,” “Abolish ICE,” and so on — have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News. Obviously, the conservative media have played an important role in publicizing (and often distorting) the most radical ideas from the activist left. But the right didn’t invent these edgy slogans; the left did, injecting them into the national bloodstream.Nonprofits on the left, Chait argued, “set out to build a new Democratic majority. When the underpinnings of its theory collapsed, the movement it built simply continued onward, having persuaded itself that its ideas constituted an absolute moral imperative.”Chait went on:The grim irony is that, in attempting to court nonwhite voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.The defeat of Democratic candidates up and down the ticket in the 2021 Virginia election renewed the intraparty debate.ALG Research, the major polling firm in the Joe Biden campaign, conducted, along with Third Way, a postelection study of the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, in which Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee. The ALG study of swing voters, which I have reported on in past columns, found, for example, that Republican highlighting of critical race theory had a subtle effect on voters:CRT in schools is not an issue in and of itself, but it taps into these voters’ frustrations. Voters were nearly unanimous in describing the country as divided and feeling that politics is unavoidably in their faces.While the voters ALG studied knew that critical race theory had not been formally adopted as part of Virginia’s curriculum, the report continued,they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history, and other things. They absolutely want their kids to hear the good and the bad of American history, at the same time they are worried that racial and cultural issues are taking over the state’s curricula. We should expect this backlash to continue, especially as it plays into another way where parents and communities feel like they are losing control over their schools in addition to the basics of even being able to decide if they’re open or not.As my colleague Jeremy W. Peters wrote in a postelection analysis last year, criticshave argued that Democrats are trying to explain major issues — such as inflation, crime and school curriculum — with answers that satisfy the party’s progressive base but are unpersuasive and off-putting to most other voters. The clearest example is in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost his election after spending weeks trying to minimize and discredit his opponent’s criticisms of public school education, particularly the way that racism is talked about. Mr. McAuliffe accused the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, of campaigning on a “made-up” issue and of blowing a “racist dog whistle.”But, Peters continued:About a quarter of Virginia voters said that the debate over teaching critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become a stand-in for a debate over what to teach about race and racism in schools, was the most important factor in their decision, and 72 percent of those voters cast ballots for Mr. Youngkin, according to a survey of more than 2,500 voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization.For leaders of the Democratic Party, these developments pose a particularly frustrating problem because they pay an electoral price for policy proposals and rhetoric that are outside party control.Some might argue that Republicans have the same problem in reverse, but that is not the case. The Republican Party cannot rein in its radical wing and has shown no real inclination to do so. Worse, to succeed in 2022 and 2024, it may not need to.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More